Building wealth: What I know now and how I created our mini family office

Last week Maria and I started a fund for a property in Spain.

Two thousand Australian dollars. Not exactly a down payment. More like a symbolic gesture toward a future version of ourselves who has their act together.

But it's sitting in an account with a label on it now. Which means it's real in a way it wasn't before.

We've been going to Spain for a few years. Maria's family is there. The trips are genuinely some of the best weeks of our lives. Full of family, warm, the kind of time together that's almost impossible to manufacture at home when you're running businesses and answering Slack messages into the evening.

But here's the pattern we kept repeating: save, go, spend, come home, look at the bank account, start again.

The experiences compounded. The cash didn't.

That's when I noticed something uncomfortable about myself. I was running Gallantway like a CEO and my personal finances like my twenty-three year old self with a good excuse.

Spreadsheets, targets, weekly reviews for the business. A vague collection of savings accounts and an optimistic assumption that it would all somehow work out for my personal life. I could tell you Gallantway's weekly profitability and FTE utilisation down to two decimal places. I had absolutely no idea what our net worth was or what we could do with it.

I'd read the Barefoot Investor. I had the buckets. I felt very organised.

I was not organised. I was just better at feeling organised than I was at actually being it.

The business wasn't the plan. It was just one piece of a much bigger puzzle I hadn't drawn yet.

So Maria and I built what I now call our mini family office.

Not a team of advisors in matching suits. Not a Cayman Islands trust structure. Just a deliberate system for running our family wealth with the same seriousness I'd always applied to the business. Here's what that actually looks like.

1. What if your life had a P&L (it's oddly freeing...)

A business without a P&L is just expensive activity. The same, it turns out, is true for how you spend as a family.

When you start treating your family wealth like a business - assets, liabilities, income, expenses, targets, regular reviews - something strange happens. Decisions that used to feel emotional become surprisingly rational. Trade-offs that felt impossible become obvious. Conversations about money become conversations about goals.

As someone who spent years convinced that spreadsheets were for people who couldn't think creatively, I can report that after two years of this: it's far more freeing than you'd expect.

We have one tracking sheet. Every asset, every liability, updated regularly, decisions made together. Not complicated. Just deliberate. The creativity, it turns out, goes into deciding what you're building - not avoiding the numbers.

2. What you measure, you manage

I applied it religiously to Gallantway and our clients, but completely ignored it at home for most of my thirties.

Once we started tracking the full picture - property equity, super, investments, cash, business value, the big bets - we stopped making decisions in isolation. A business decision became a wealth decision. A spending decision became an asset decision. The Spain fund stopped feeling like a maybe and started feeling like a line item.

The numbers don't lie to you the way your assumptions do.

3. We treat Health as an asset class

This one took the longest. Probably because nobody puts it on a balance sheet.

A bit like what happened in the 1980's when businesses realised they should add their brand to their balance sheet.

Your earning capacity, your energy, your ability to show up for the people and the work that matter - all of it runs on one underlying asset that most of us quietly neglect while building everything else. I burned out running Gallantway. I know exactly what it costs when that asset degrades.

Now health sits alongside property and investments. It gets the same attention, the same deliberateness, the same long-term thinking. Because compounding works in both directions. Neglect doesn't pause politely while you finish your busy season.

4. The family office exists to serve the family

This is the one that reframes everything else.

Wealth is infrastructure. It's not the destination - it's what gets you there. The question worth asking isn't how much can we accumulate. It's what does this need to enable, and at what cost to everything else.

For us: Time in Spain. Starting a family without that low-grade financial panic in the background. Building businesses we're genuinely proud of, not just ones that pay. Eventually retiring with enough to live well and give generously.

When you know what the wealth is actually for, every decision gets easier. You stop optimising a number and start building toward something specific.

That's the mini family office. A tracking sheet, a regular conversation with your partner about what you're actually building toward, and a decision to take your personal finances as seriously as you take your work.

Most people don't start because they think it requires more money, more sophistication, or a better moment than the one they're in. It doesn't. It just requires deciding that your life deserves the same rigour as your business.

Two thousand dollars. Label on the account.

More real than it was last week.

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